Five years ago today, on November 9th in 2004, Mozilla Firefox heralded its first official 1.0 release.

Emerging as a successor to the Mozilla Suite’s browser and positioned as a lighter weight alternative based on the same underlying technology, the open source web browser has seen countless point releases and two full point zero iterations since then. It now commands a portion of the market that is challenged only by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, and its features have made their way into almost every competing browser on the market.

Given that, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Mozilla Firefox seemed at the time. Following a series of beta releases of Firefox, then called Phoenix to symbolize the rebirth of Mozilla web browsing technology in a swifter, sleeker and lighter form, the 1.0 release was most computer user’s first introduction to tabbed browsing… though, of course, the Opera browser had done this year’s before. Firefox also supported popup blocking and autocompletion based on frequency of use, which quickly made the browser a productivity champ.

Just as importantly, Firefox brought intelligent auto-completion to the table, as well as — for me — Firefox’s most revolutionary feature: extensions. These small snips of code could be effortlessly installed to the browser to significantly expand its core functionality.

Five years later, Firefox keeps getting better, and the forthcoming 4.0 release will substantially support the new HTML 5 standard. Although their have been new challengers to Firefox’s crown as king of all browsers, the likes of Google Chrome, good as they are, will have an uphill battle on their hands to match, function for function, all of the bullet points on Firefox’s feature list. Let’s hope the next five years of Mozilla Firefox are as revolutionary as the first.